Dynasty's End

Chicago Tribune Founder Joseph Medill's injunction to his family was: "Well, print the news. I can't tell you anything else. Just print the news." The dynasty that followed never forgot this advice, but each of its flamboyant members had something additional to contribute: a stamp of personality that enlivened four generations of American journalism. In Chicago it was the incomparable Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, in Washington the acid Eleanor ("Cissy") Patterson, in New York the swashbuckling Captain Joseph Medill Patterson. More recently, a raven-haired bundle of energy named Alicia Patterson Guggenheim bore the family banner with her Long Island tabloid, Newsday. Last week at the age of 56, Alicia Patterson died, and for the first time in 143 years no member of the dynasty ran a newspaper in the U.S.

"Keep Alicia Moving." She was Captain Joe's daughter, the child he raised like a son. From the age of four, when he sent her to Berlin to learn German, Alicia was a product of his restless ways. Full of her father's high spirits, she was troublesome enough to be bounced out of two of the world's fanciest finishing schools before managing to get through Foxcroft. She roamed Europe with her mother and sister, but her mother finally despaired of trying to keep her in tow. When Mother cabled Joe asking him to talk to his daughter, she received the reply: "Keep Alicia moving."

Alicia really preferred her father's flamboyant company, learned to fly airplanes with him, stood fascinated at his side as he built the country's biggest paper, New York City's blunt and breezy Daily News. She even put in stints at reporting for Daddy's paper. But Captain Joe winced at her work, and after involving the paper in a libel suit, she finally quit. Turning to other adventure she hunted in Asia, fly-fished in Norway, piloted her own plane around Europe. Twice divorced from husbands of her father's choice, Alicia married Copper Fortune Heir Harry Guggenheim over Captain Joe's strenuous objections.

As Newsday put it in Alicia's obit last week, relations between father and son-in-law were "correct but never cordial." Father and daughter grew distant.* Sin In the Choir Loft. Alicia decided she wanted her own newspaper. Her husband agreed ("Everybody ought to have a job"), wisely judging that this would be an outlet for her enormous energies, and put up $70,000 to get the paper started. Her idea was to publish a suburban daily for Long Island, where she and Guggenheim lived in a 30-room Norman mansion in fashionable Sands Point. What she had in mind was something "readable, entertaining, comprehensive, informative, interpretive, lively, but still sufficiently serious-minded so that no Long Islander will feel compelled to read any New York newspaper." When the first issue of Newsday came off the press in an old garage in Hempstead in 1940, Alicia was disappointed: "I'm afraid it looks like hell." It was soon looking better as Alicia poured her energies into the paper, bringing it to life with a healthy mixture of news, irreverence and breeziness. Newsday's format was novel for a tabloid, with large type, three-column width on its pages, and a center Feature section stuffed in upside down for handy removal. Her interest covered every field--from politics to sin in the choir loft. When a frustrated editor asked her what she wanted in the paper, she shouted back the Patterson formula: "Dogs! Cats! Murders!" Guggenheim kept an eye on the business side, but had some editorial ideas too. They did not always agree with Alicia's. First year on the streets, the paper was in print with an open editorial split between the proprietors on presidential nominees. When Editor Alicia plugged for Franklin Roosevelt, her husband, a lifelong Republican, demanded and got space to air his own pro-Willkie views. Again in 1960, they went into print on facing pages to plug their different candidates--this time she was for Adlai Stevenson, he for Richard Nixon.

"Does that little lady in the tweed suit really run that big, noisy Long Island newspaper?" an incredulous New York banker once asked one of her editors. "Run it?" he replied. "Hell, she drives it!" In 1954, for crusading against labor racketeering, Newsday won its first Pulitzer Prize, and by this year it had grown into the twelfth largest evening daily in the U.S., with a circulation of 370,000. It grew fat on advertising, now carries more linage than any New York daily, and is second in the U.S. only to the Los Angeles Times. Said one former editor: "The paper was the only thing in her life--along with unyielding loyalty to friends--that she really cared about." An Editor to the End. When Alicia entered Doctors Hospital in Manhattan last month with a bleeding ulcer, she ignored doctors' protests, ran the paper from her bed, ordering stories, discussing projects, arguing with editors by phone. By taking it easy and following a strict diet, she could have cured her ulcer without an operation. "But she wanted the surgery," said Newsday Editorial Director Bill Woestendiek. "She said she wanted to live her life her way or not live at all." So last week she was wheeled into the operating room. Bleeding from the first surgery required two more operations within 24 hours. That night she died.

If Alicia Patterson's wishes are followed, the dynastic line will not disappear at Newsday. Her choices as successors are Nephew Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, 26, a young newsman in training at the paper, and Niece Alice Albright Hoge, 22. The choice will be up to her husband, who owns 51% of Newsday's stock.

* Just before he died in 1946, an embittered Joe Patterson all but wrote her out of his will, leaving her only a 3% interest in the dynasty's publishing empire.

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